


Captive

by Choose_to_see_Beauty



Category: Tarzan (1999)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-16
Updated: 2014-02-16
Packaged: 2018-01-12 15:51:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1190868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Choose_to_see_Beauty/pseuds/Choose_to_see_Beauty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knew exactly when he caught her attention, and since that moment she’d been captivated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Captive

Looking back years later, she’d never quite be able to figure out when she had begun to truly love him, but she knew exactly when he caught her attention, and since that moment she’d been captivated. 

She remembers the adrenaline pulsing through her veins as he sets her on a tree branch, her back against the trunk. She remembers looking up at his hulking form, the corded muscles, the skin so worn by sun that it looks like tanned leather. The hair in ropes tangling around his shoulders. And mostly, his nakedness – or at least, his relative undress. She had never seen so much flesh in her entire life, and yet he stands before her as if this is just an average day. 

He was hardly better than an animal when she first beheld him, and she remembers feeling acutely that she might have escaped one danger to discover a far greater one. Because a monkey would never have thought to take from her more than her sketchbook, or her parasol. A man –if she could call him a man – might want to take significantly more. 

She can tell that he is surveying her, and it makes her stomach clench. He reaches toward her, and she knows that he will wrench her to him and that she will not have the strength – or the balance – to fight him off if he wants to have his way with her in this tree. She is terrified. 

But he reaches for her hand. Holds it up, palm facing himself. Draws her ruined glove away with the most singular focus, as if his whole world is contained in the palm of her hand. He stares intently at her pale palm, then spreads his own hand against it. There are callouses across his knuckles – does he use them to walk? But their hands press against one another and mirror each other, his making hers look like a child’s. 

He sees the match, and she sees him seeing it. He meets her eyes, and she doesn’t see the darkening of lust that she was afraid of. What she sees is a spark of understanding and a sheen of desperation. She realizes that he is not an animal. He is a man, and he knows that she is a woman. It is almost as if she is looking into a mirror. She sees her desire to understand the gorillas mirrored in his desire to understand her. And though this hulking, savage, nude friend of hers frightens her more than anyone she’s ever met, he also fascinates her.

That day when he pulled her head to his chest to feel the beating of his heart, she was petrified. Now she rests with that steady drumbeat in her ears every night, pulsing through her as she pillows her head on his chest. 

Now her hands are covered in freckles and padded with callouses just like his. Sometimes they stand palm to palm, eye to eye, and just look at each other. And every time it brings her back to that moment in that tree, when she saw fascination flash in his eyes and knew she wanted to be the one to show him everything. 

He was never a jailer, despite her fears. But from the very first, she was his captive.


End file.
